Chien-Hsun Huang
Fudan University
Title: Reconstruction of evolutionary history of several plant families using bioinformatics as a framwork for comparative studies
Biography
Biography: Chien-Hsun Huang
Abstract
Bioinformatics is getting vital in the genomic era with the advance of sequencing tecniques leading to large amounts of datasets generated around the world. Similarly is the emerging importance of the comparative studies, instead of focusing on understanding one particular model species in previous days, to find the mechanisms basal and universal to most of the species as well as the ones specified to a few organisms. However, a well-resolved and robust phylogeny is required for many of the comparative studies to make assumptions as well as possible. Thus, we focus on resolving the phylogeny of angiosperms, hoping to provide a framework for comparative studies in plants. Using large numbers of transcriptomic datasets, we selected hundreds of low-copy or single-copy nuclear genes to reconstruct the phylogeny of several angiosperm families such as Asteraceae, Rosaceae and Brassicaceae. In these studies, we first provide a solid relationships among members of these families by using different approaches to confirm the results, and then reconstruct the history of morphological characters or gene/genome duplications based on the model phylogeny. We have found repeated and nested whole-genome duplications in Asteraceae, and also revreal the evolutionary history of fruit type in Rosaceae. Furthermore, we especially focus on and anticipate to provide a solid framework and sufficient information for Brassicaceae to be used as a “model family” in plant biology.